“If the builders get to build their big buildings then the city loses” - it’s always portrayed like that. We’ve got to get out of that.
The history of street grids apparently dates back to Hippodamus in the fifth century B.C. The Grecian’s legacy is most visible in New York city, that some 2400 years later, in 1811, built a street matrix of 11 avenues and 155 crosstown streets. Even that is now well over 200 years old. And yet it’s evergreen, says urban planning expert Bimal Patel in an interview with BloombergQuint, on the sidelines of the IDFC Institute Dialogues, 2017.
When New York was a tiny bit of a town on the tip of Manhattan Island they planned a grid of streets that stretched out miles into the hinterland. And they hung on to that street grid.
Patel says, “Every city is like this”.
Well, except most Indian cities.
The lack of adequate urban planning in India is not a problem to be shrugged away. Not with the rapid rise in the urban population. According to the government’s most recent Economic Survey, in 1991 there were 220 million Indians living in cities - about a quarter of the country’s population. By 2011, that number rose to 380 million, that’s one third of the population. Urban Indians produce more than 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
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Patel explains what cities need to do to get their streets in order. Here are edited comments from an interview with him.
THE INDIA CITY PLANNING STORY
Basically a lot of India’s cities have still to be built. Cities will grow out in the periphery, and in the centre of town and in already built up areas they will get developed. This is the process that happened in Europe and in the United States in the 19th century when they were urbanising and this happens inevitably in every country as it urbanises.
It’s a massive challenge, to deal with this process in the effective way, it’s almost impossible.
Because you have in the beginning people moving into cities, they have very low incomes. The city’s productivity is high but there’s just not enough money to solve all the problems that it has. You build infrastructure over a period of time - as cities start creating wealth and that wealth starts getting invested. In that sense it’s a very challenging phase for any society.
The important thing is that there are many things if done right at this stage of urbanisation will allow us to reap the benefits of urbanisation.
SO WHAT SHOULD LOCAL GOVERNMENTS DO?
The key thing is for government to be able to build the common infrastructure that households and firms need to be able to productively build their facilities and work in any city.
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Go to other cities in India and you will see that they are all failing miserably. There’s a haphazard sprawl going out into the countryside. So what Gujarat’s doing right is something that a lot of other cities can learn from. What Gujarat is doing right has been done right since last 75 years. So it’s not new, and at that time it was part of Maharashtra state so it’s not even a Gujarati invention . And the Japanese have been doing this since the 19th century. The Germans too used this technique a lot.